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Ars Attacks! What we’re after at CES 2011

It's that time of year again, where the slot machines of Vegas go largely …

At various times and in various places, the Ars crew will begin to board airplanes tomorrow to head to Las Vegas for CES 2011. The festivities start today, January 5, and we will be liveblogging the following press conferences (all times PST):

Intel: 10:00am

NVIDIA: 12:00pm

Microsoft: 1:00pm

Samsung: 2:00pm

Motorola: 4:00pm

Sony: 5:00pm

Steve Ballmer Keynote: 6:30pm

Yes, it's a grueling schedule, but your tireless Ars reporters will be there with their running shoes on, their laptops charged, and their 3G cards connected. Our final liveblog will be the CES kickoff keynote at 8:30am Thursday, January 6, where CEA President and CEO, Gary Shapiro and Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg will hold forth on the state of all things consumer electronic.

As for stories, we'll be keeping a close eye on the tablet scene. The MIDs of CES's past have now been flattened out a bit and will reappear as "slates" and "tablets" this time around, and we'll be bringing you as much hands-on coverage of as many of these devices as we can, er, get our hands on.

We'll also be taking another look at the e-reader scene. Last year's CES featured a ton of brand new e-readers, all of which were promptly lined up and shot shortly after the iPad's explosive debut made it clear that they had no future. Is there any life left in the e-reader scene, outside of Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble? We hope to find out this year.

We also intend to follow up on the "smartbook"—the ARM-based answer to the Atom-powered netbook. We saw smartbooks last year at CES, but they weren't too impressive. Will this year's crop, based on beefier ARM chips and an improved Android OS, look better?

Then there's the Internet-connected TV. Sure, the Google TV has hit a rough patch in recent weeks, but Google isn't the only company trying to do this. Who else is trying to marry the Web and TV, and what are they offering?

Finally, the two most important things we're looking for this year are surprise and delight. We want to be surprised by novelty and ingenuity, and delighted by beauty and utility. Despite the massive size of CES, genuine surprise and delight are probably the two hardest things for jaded gadget watchers like us to find amidst all the me-too products that crowd the floor. But if we do get lucky, we'll let you know right here on the Ars front page. So stay tuned, and if there's something in particular you'd like to see covered, e-mail us and let us know.